Chapter Text
The Tombs of the Star Corridor weren’t all that different now compared to how they used to be.
Yuuji could remember the first time he’d walked through them, following behind Tsukumo and Choso, Fushiguro at his side, Yuuta and Maki behind them. It was hard to believe that it had been over two years since that moment—that so much could change in so little time, and yet…
And yet nothing was really all that different at all.
The abandoned Tombs of the Star Corridor were just as empty as they had been when Tengen resided in them. The only difference was a coating of dust a year or so thick, now that no one was concerned with keeping the place clean. The place was haunted, in an untraditional sense. There were ghosts here, in the room Yuuji found where two half-drunk cups of tea sat forever untouched, the tea long since dried into a nasty crust on the bottom before being coated likewise in dust.
He wondered if this was where Tengen and Tsukumo sat while Choso fought Kenjaku. He wondered if this was where they decided they would save his life no matter what, only for him to die later, somewhere else, some other time, for some other person—
Yuuji closed the door softly, pressing his forehead against the grain of the wood.
Fuck.
He knew he shouldn’t have come here, and yet…he couldn’t resist coming all the same.
Yuuji took a deep breath, lifted his head, and carried on. Maybe he would find his way out instead of continuing onwards. He had seen everything he really needed to see, anyway. It was a place, just like any other, a remnant of a time long since past of which he was only one of very, very few survivors. Time would move forward, as time did. Things would change, history would forget him, this place would become just as lost as any other grand historical sight.
He didn’t need to entomb it in his memories—the ever turning wheel of life and death and curses and cursed would do that for him.
Yuuji turned a corner, then another, working his way vaguely towards the exit. He let himself sink into his thoughts—without Tengen here to change the layout, all paths in the Tombs of the Star Corridor would eventually lead out—which was, perhaps, why it took him so long to notice.
He was no longer leaving footprints in the dust that trailed after him.
He hadn’t in a long time, in fact, because there was no dust to leave footprints in. When he turned to look behind him—really look—he saw only sparkling clean floors in the hall stretching behind him. The corridor looked just as pristine as it did the day that Yuuji came down here with the others. It was almost like…
Yuuji turned back forward, feeling the aching throb in his chest that came with having a beating heart, that came with living. That light—was it possible—he had definitely been walking away, not deeper into—
Yuuji rested a hand against the wall, and then pulled it away again quickly.
Cursed energy.
Tengen’s cursed energy.
That shouldn’t be—that wasn’t—
Before he could really process that information—before he could even really acknowledge the weight of that information—he heard a soft clicking sound.
Two months in a basement watching movies meant that Yuuji recognized the sound immediately, even if he had never heard it in person before. He lifted his gaze disbelievingly—surely it wasn’t possible that someone else would be here— but it was possible. As sure as the sun would rise, Yuuji’s eye told him that there was a man standing in the abandoned Tombs of the Star Corridor that suddenly didn’t feel so abandoned.
Beyond that, he was holding a gun.
He was holding a gun, pointed at a girl that Yuuji could only barely see through the twisting branches of the walls—a girl that couldn’t be older than fifteen—and he was about to shoot her.
Yuuji moved before he could waste any more time thinking about it. It didn’t matter why they were here or weren’t here—he was absolutely not going to sit idle and watch someone die.
Never again.
“Or you can turn back,” Suguru said. “And return home with Kuroi.”
“What?” Riko asked, turning to him with blazing eyes.
She was so innocent, Riko was. It was as refreshing as it was strange—he’d been around Satoru’s uncaring attitude and Shoko’s aloof indifference for so long that most days, he didn’t remember that there were people in the world made out of satin instead of steel. If he was honest with himself—which he rarely was—sometimes he struggled to remember why he was doing this in the first place. He struggled to understand what it meant to use his strength to help someone, instead of merely using his strength to fight.
“When Satoru and I were given this mission, our teacher described the merger as an ‘erasure,’” Suguru continued. “He beats around the bush a lot, for someone that thinks with his muscles instead of his brain, so it took me a moment to work it out. But he talked about it like it was a bad thing—something that was worth disagreeing with, even if he never would have said so out loud, and he certainly wouldn’t have said so to us.”
“I…” Riko started, eyes wide. “I don’t…”
“We’re the strongest,” Suguru said. It was bragging, but it was true, too. “No matter what choice you make, we will protect your future.”
“It’s always been me,” Riko said, sounding impossibly sad.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been special as long as I’ve been alive,” she explained. “It became normal for me after a while. My parents died in a car accident when I was very young. I don’t even remember it, but I’ve always been just…just alone. I thought that if I merged with Tengen, no matter how painful, that sadness and loneliness would go away. I—I still think that—”
She cut off with a sharp gasp, one hand flying to her chest as if she had been stabbed there. Panic lanced through Suguru’s entire body and he reached out to steady her, checking and checking again for wounds even though there were none.
“Riko?” Suguru asked, tightening his grip on her elbow. She made a small, pained noise. “Riko, what’s going on?”
“I must have started—” she babbled. “The ritual—I can’t control it—Suguru, I—help, I—Kuroi must have—or Satoru, maybe—you need to—”
Suguru wasn’t Satoru, and he didn’t have the Six Eyes, but he was suddenly acutely aware of what Riko’s problem was.
Her cursed energy was completely depleted, when it had been perfectly normal before they came down here. Not so much so that she would die, but definitely enough that she was liable to pass out.
That was when he heard a familiar bang—something made familiar by movies and television shows, not real life—and Suguru reflexively flinched, moving as if to cover Riko though he knew he would never move faster than a bullet.
Except—
No bullet hit him. No bullet hit her. Judging by a second smashing sound, the bullet hadn’t hit any flesh at all, just the surrounding structures.
Belatedly, Suguru looked in the direction of the first, significantly worse sound.
The man from earlier was standing there, despite the impossibility of it. He had gotten past Satoru. Which meant Satoru was—
Suguru became devastatingly, horribly aware of two things all at once.
First—and most startlingly—Satoru must be dead, or pretty damn close to it.
Second—and most importantly—Amanai Riko’s life had just been saved by someone other than him or Satoru.
There was another man standing beside the one from outside. He was tall and well-built, with short, pink hair and sunglasses. He was wearing a black hoodie and a pair of red shoes that were duct taped together. He was also, notably, covered in scars—small, crisscrossing ones that lined his forearms, one at the corner of his mouth, another stretching above and below a pair of dinged up looking sunglasses resting on the bridge of his nose.
For a moment, they were frozen, still, as the original man from outside turned, eyes narrowed, to stare at the hands that had pulled his arm to the side, throwing off his shot.
And then the original man moved, snapping out of the pink-haired guy’s hold and whipping the barrel of the pistol up towards his face. Pink Hair jerked backwards fast enough to avoid the hit, though not far enough to get completely out of range. The reason for this became obvious when he chained his dodge into a disarming maneuver, as swift and as clean as if he had done it a thousand times. Honestly, Suguru wouldn’t be surprised if he had.
A moment later, reality crashed back into Suguru.
The man from earlier was good enough to get past Satoru. Suguru didn’t know who Pink Hair was and he didn’t have time to find out, but if he was going to fight that man—he needed help.
Help that Suguru got one step into giving him before Riko slumped against him, nearly dragging him to the ground with her where he still gripped her elbows. When Suguru glanced down at her, her eyelids were fluttering, her skin pale and flushed. It was exhaustion, simply put—she had used too much of her cursed energy and suffered the consequences for it…though the question kind of was…what the hell had she done?
Suguru warred with himself. The mission was to keep Riko safe until the merger—if Riko never merged with Tengen, then he was responsible for keeping her safe so long as the mission was active, and it was. Logically, he should do everything he could to continue protecting her, which included fighting the man that had nearly killed her. But leaving her laying here while he ran off to fight felt wrong too.
Suguru glanced back up at the pink-haired sorcerer, expecting to see him being overpowered easily and in need of a rescue.
Instead, he had things well in hand with the man they met outside earlier. The gun had disappeared somewhere while Suguru wasn’t looking, but the man from earlier had already replaced it with a sword, long and wicked looking. And, despite how strong and fast he was outside…
The pink-haired sorcerer was somehow just as strong and just as fast, approaching the fight with a kind of single-minded fervor that sent a prickle of fear down Suguru’s spine, even as a mere bystander.
It’s a good thing that guy is on our side, he thought, except he didn’t actually know if that was true.
“Suguru,” Riko murmured, half asleep.
Just like that, the fight between Pink Hair and the assassin seemed hardly a concern of his at all.
Suguru turned his attention back to Riko, checking her over again. She was just as unharmed as before, thankfully, despite how hard that was to believe now. He adjusted his grip on her, wrapping one arm around her waist and pulling her more or less upright so that he could tuck her face against his shoulder. Pink Hair didn’t matter, he decided. He could live or die in that battle for all he cared—Suguru had other priorities.
She had been seconds away from dying, after all.
“You’re okay,” Suguru murmured, adjusting her so he could hook his elbow under her knees. “You’re going to be fine. I’ll get you to Shoko, she’ll help.”
“I’m sorry,” Riko said. “I didn’t mean to do it, I swear.”
“Shh,” Suguru said, despite the fact that he had no idea what she was talking about. That was probably the exhaustion speaking, anyway.
“He’ll save Satoru,” Riko murmured, which was strange enough to give Suguru pause. “I shouldn’t have—but at least—”
“Shh,” Suguru said, deciding it didn’t matter. “Shh. I’ve got you. It’s fine.”
He could carry her easily enough. She hardly weighed anything, for being a human being not that much younger than he himself was.
“Don’t carry me like a princess,” Riko muttered, as Suguru got on his knees, testing her weight before he stood. “That would be too embarrassing.”
“Sorry, but I think you’ll just have to deal with it,” Suguru said, and put one foot on the ground, crouching.
“Take me to Tengen, m’kay? I need to do it while I still can. It’ll be better if I—”
“I’m taking you home, Riko,” Suguru said. “That’s what you said earlier, isn’t it? Or were you just getting my hopes up so you could crush them later, hm?”
“Su—”
“Oh, right,” a rough voice said, and Suguru felt himself stiffening, still half-crouching with Riko in his arms. That voice—that had to be— “I suppose I should probably ask you a few things.”
“Feeling chatty all of a sudden, are you?” the first man spat.
Suguru looked back at the two of them. In the time it had taken him to talk to Riko, the pink-haired man had managed to land a hit on the dark-haired man—something Suguru only knew because he could see a trickle of blood spilling out of his nose.
“Nah, man,” the pink-haired man said. They seemed to have mutually decided to take a break, even though neither fighter looked particularly relaxed.
Distantly, Suguru noticed that Pink Hair was missing the smallest finger on his left hand.
“What, then?” the man asked, prowling slowly in a circle.
“I’d like to know the reason I'm killing you,” Pink Hair said. “That’s all.”
“Hell if I know,” the assassin said, spinning his sword around. “You’re the one that’s doing it.”
“I—” Pink Hair said, while his neck darkened in embarrassment. “Okay, I can’t argue with that, but you’re still the one that broke in here and attempted homicide!”
And just like that, he seemed so…young. Kind of dumb and a little whiny, just like Satoru. Suguru could see the youth in his face now, too—he was hard enough and pointy enough that Suguru wouldn’t call him any younger than seventeen, but he definitely wasn’t older than twenty either.
The man scoffed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Just how dumb are you?”
“...Asking another question doesn’t really answer the first,” the kid said, and the first guy laughed, bitter and dark, and charged.
At which point, Suguru finally witnessed a cursed technique instead of wild cursed energy. Pink Hair waited for the assassin to get close, looking at first like he was going for another disarming counter. Instead he rushed forwards, fingers reaching as he ducked under a slash, and then grazed the man’s side with just the tips of his fingers. A dotted line appeared, slicing along the man’s ribs, and a pair of scissors followed afterwards. The assassin skittered to the side, but a second was apparently all it took—when he lifted his arm, there was a clean gash in both his black tee and his flank.
“You’re fast, for a sorcerer,” the assassin said, and it almost sounded like a compliment.
“Shit,” Pink Hair said, but with a strangely good-natured grin. “And you’re strong, for a human. I was trying to do a little more damage than a single scratch, but I guess I underestimated you.”
“Rookie mistake,” the assassin agreed, almost sounding like a proud mentor instead of someone that was trying his hardest to turn Pink Hair into a pincushion.
He charged Pink Hair with his sword raised. Pink Hair performed a complicated, spinning, acrobatic dodge the likes of which Suguru knew he would never manage himself, sending the assassin stumbling backwards with his finishing kick. Not that the assassin was thrown for long, almost immediately charging again. Pink Hair dodged that too, ducking under the blade and coming up behind his opponent. The assassin stepped forward in pursuit of him, but it was a more calculated move than it had seemed at first—Suguru spotted the dotted lines on the archway Pink Hair’s fingertips had just barely grazed a moment before the whole thing came crashing down after the assassin, sealing them and their fight away from Suguru, Riko, and at the bottom of the tree…Tengen.
“Suguru,” Riko gasped, her hands tightening into fists on Suguru’s jacket. “Suguru, I’m so sorry—I’m not strong enough to go—I’m sorry—”
Suguru reached up as best he could, laying one hand against the back of her head. It was the best he knew to do for comfort, even if he was still a little confused about what Riko meant. Then he shifted their position and stood. Just like he thought—Riko was light.
“I don’t know what you’re apologizing for,” he said, as he started for a random tunnel. It was hard to say where these passages would lead, with the one he had come through blocked off now.
“Satoru—”
“Satoru will be fine,” Suguru said, even though he was admittedly worried about it himself. “Let’s get you home already. As long as that’s still something you want?”
She was silent for long enough that Suguru started to think she had passed out.
“Yeah,” Riko said, at the end of the pause. She curled up against him, despite her earlier claim of how embarrassing it was, and hid her face in his shoulder. “Let’s go home.”
With one last look over his shoulder, Suguru took Riko with him and left the distant glow of Tengen’s prepped merger.
In Yuuji’s defense, no one had ever called him particularly smart or particularly observant.
Yeah, he had noticed something was weird in the tombs. Yeah, this guy he was fighting had a face like Fushiguro and a smile like Maki and an outfit like Gojo. Yeah, he had felt Tengen’s presence when Tengen was supposed to be long gone.
Except those things hadn’t felt like they mattered, okay?
At least, not until he stepped out into a very much intact courtyard at Jujutsu High, on a beautiful, sunshine filled day in summer instead of a dreary, snowy day in December.
The fight had kept him plenty busy up to this point, but now, Yuuji was forced to finally acknowledge that some weird shit had to be happening.
Because…
This was not…
“Getting tired?” his opponent asked.
His opponent who looked like Fushiguro and smiled like Maki. Not just that, Yuuji could see Naoya in the way his hair fell across his forehead, Mai in the way he stood.
And the one thing all of these people had in common was—
“You’re a Zen’in,” Yuuji observed.
Another impossibility, considering all of those were dead.
“I don’t use that name anymore,” he said. “It’s Fushiguro now.”
Fushiguro…?
Like…?
“I wouldn’t normally use this,” the man that was quite possibly Megumi’s father said. “I’ve only got it because of the Gojo brat, anyway, but you seem strong enough to…”
The…who?
Like opposite poles in a magnetic field, Yuuji found his gaze drawn towards a scene he had barely glanced over when he first stepped out. Even as the curse bound to his opponent coughed up the end of a spear, even as every instinct he ever had screamed at him to pay attention to the predator in front of him, Yuuji looked away. Back at…
He wasn’t much more than a shock of white in a sea of red. Strands of hair sticking together as they soaked in blood, turning red as life bled out of him. But he was unmistakable, impossible, incomprehensible, from the white of his hair to the sparkling, sky-like blue of his eyes, even to the school uniform he was wearing—a school uniform Yuuji hadn’t seen in years, and certainly not on him .
He was Gojo Satoru, even if he wasn’t the Gojo Satoru Yuuji had known, and he was dying.
Dead.
Dying again, dead again —
Staring at Yuuji with not so lifeless eyes. Gojo’s lips moved, though Yuuji wasn’t close enough to hear anything he said.
And then it didn’t matter, because it was too late. There was a sharp pain in Yuuji’s stomach, the stuttering out of his cursed energy as the weapon slid into his guts, the tear that came with the spear being jerked back.
Oh, Yuuji thought as he fell forward onto his knees. That must be the Inverted Spear of Heaven. No wonder Gojo-sensei locked that away—this sucks.
“Really?” the man that called himself Fushiguro said. “Only one hit? Pretty pathetic, aren’t you?”
Yuuji wanted to laugh, so he did, the sound harsh and rough as it burst out of his throat.
“I gotta be real with you, Fushiguro,” he said, and didn’t that feel unnatural—to say that name again after all this time, to say it to someone that wasn’t the Fushiguro he knew. “I’ve got no idea what’s going on, but that’s Gojo Satoru over there.” He pressed one hand to the wound, already feeling the sharp return of his cursed energy to his body. He had always had such quick recovery times. “And you should have left that fucking spear in me.”
Yuuji took the hand that had been coated in his blood away from his body. He could feel it—the blood collecting and pooling, responding to his cursed technique. He could see Fushiguro’s eyes widening, and for good reason. Wherever Yuuji was that he was fighting his old friend’s dad and looking at a teenaged version of his old teacher covered in a blood, he was fairly sure no one outside of the Kamo family would have Blood Manipulation here.
“Convergence,” Yuuji said, mostly to wig his opponent out more than to announce it, as the blood was obviously already spinning. “Piercing Blood.”
Fushiguro swore as Yuuji formed the funnel with his fingers, only barely managing to bring up the spear to deflect piercing blood with the blade. It pushed him back as it was—heels kicking up dirt from the stone as he tried to recollect his balance. His back smashed against a nearby building, sharp and violent, and then the pre-prepped stream of blood ran out a moment later.
Fushiguro heaved a rough breath out, and looked up at Yuuji. He looked strikingly like Fushiguro then—the Fushiguro that Yuuji knew—eyes blazing as blood dribbled down his forehead. Yuuji watched him as he circled, not bothering to heal the wound in his side, not yet. The blood was a good thing, now that he could control its flow. Yuuji put his hands in his pockets though—casual, irritatingly so, he knew—as he circled slowly, easily but intentionally putting himself between Fushiguro and younger, heavily bleeding Gojo.
“Alright, that was interesting,” Fushiguro said, flicking Yuuji’s blood off the end of the spear. “I'll give you props for that. What's your name, kid?”
“Yuuji.”
“Kamo Yuuji, I assume? Nice secret-keeping on their part, I guess.”
“No,” Yuuji said. “That’s not my name.”
“Not gonna tell me what it is?”
“Well, it's not like you introduced yourself to me,” Yuuji said, smiling slyly.
Fushiguro barked a laugh. “Fushiguro Toji, then.”
“I would say nice to meet you,” Yuuji said, “but I'm not sure it is.”
Toji—because referring to him as Fushiguro was too weird—laughed again. He laughed and he laughed, voice sharp and manic in all the same ways Fushiguro Megumi’s could be, and Yuuji’s forgotten heart twisted uncomfortably in his chest.
“Any chance of you letting me back into those tombs to kill the girl?” Toji asked, when he was done laughing. He had a grin like a shark, a scar curving over the corner of his mouth. “I’d kind of hate to kill you now. You seem like you’d be more fun as a business partner than as a corpse.”
“Ha,” Yuuji said, taking a moment to glance at Gojo out of the corner of his eye. He was still alive, judging by the wet, gurgling sounds he kept making, but not for very much longer, Yuuji assumed. And Yuuji wasn’t exactly sure what he’d walked into—whether this was real or just some complex hallucination—but all of that blood around Gojo was making him pretty nervous about this whole thing. On the one hand, Gojo could heal himself. On the other hand, Yuuji wasn’t actually so sure about that, considering Gojo hadn’t done so yet.
And it was hard to think about what he could do about it when this man was backing him into a corner like this.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Toji said.
“Take it as a hell no if you’d like,” Yuuji countered.
Toji barked a laugh, crueler and harsher than Fushiguro had ever really sounded. “Have it your way, then.”
He reached up to the curse perched on his shoulder. The curse opened its jaws wide, consuming the spear and spitting out something else in turn.
Yuuji almost laughed again.
“Playful Cloud?” he asked.
Toji’s grin grew more sharklike. “You know it? I guess I must not he the first to think it's a good way to deal with you.” He swung it once, playfully, and kept on grinning at Yuuji. “It’s a recent acquisition. I’ve been dying to try it out. I needed to find someone strong enough first, though. You’ll do. You’ll do even better if you’ve countered it before.”
Crap, Yuuji thought, with a grin stretching his lips uncomfortably.
He had been fighting Toji for a while now, and he knew two things. One, he was like Maki—no cursed energy in exchange for a superior body. Two, he was faster and stronger than Yuuji. So far, Yuuji had been using either Sukuna’s technique or his brothers’ to make up for it. Toji was right about more than one thing, though—Playful Cloud suppressed both of those rather successfully. For one thing, it was unlikely to draw any more blood. For another, the three sections meant it was exceedingly difficult to dodge already. And last, it made it challenging for Yuuji to get close enough to use Cleave.
Though he had one other option when it came to Sukuna’s residual techniques. Though Yuuji wasn’t positive he would have the guts or the right moment to use it.
(Most of the time, he derived a vindictive pleasure from using Sukuna’s cursed techniques, if only because he knew that Sukuna would hate to know that someone as useless as Yuuji had duplicated them and could use them freely.
But there was a point, a fine line that Yuuji walked constantly, one where Sukuna’s technique stopped being useful and started being deliberately cruel. Yuuji was not a saint—he had learned how to delight in violence since he ate that first finger in June of 2018, but he was human enough still to be scared by that.)
True to his predictions, Playful Cloud wielded by someone more skilled than even Maki was a problem. Toji pressed on him, Playful Cloud snapping around him, radiating with cursed energy like it was a heater. It snapped against Yuuji’s arm and bruised it dutifully, and Yuuji pushed forward in an attempt to get his hands on Toji. Toji—who had seen this trick once before—darted back out of reach. He switched his hold on Playful Cloud, bringing the right end towards Yuuji’s head dangerously quickly.
Yuuji needed to think.
He had read enough isekais back in the day to conclude that he had probably been transported to the past, a different dimension, or both—assuming this wasn’t some bizarrely complex hallucination. And considering the presence of Fushiguro’s dad and the random girl he had saved earlier, he doubted it was a hallucination. He wouldn’t put it past himself to hallucinate a dying teenaged Gojo Satoru, but a random girl and Fushiguro’s dad? No. He was not that creative. Besides, he’d seen plenty of weird shit happen because of jujutsu—getting thrown through time didn’t exactly seem unrealistic when he thought about how Hakari turned himself immortal by gambling or how Kenjaku could literally transplant his brain into another body.
He needed to decide if this was the past or if this was a different universe. If it was just the past then he could relax—Gojo had made it to be a lot older than he was now without Yuuji’s help, and he could do it again. If this was a different universe, though, he needed to be worried. Very worried.
Ah…fuck it.
There wasn’t anything he could do anyway if it was some alternate dimension where Gojo couldn’t heal himself. Nothing other than buy time, really.
Buy time and draw Toji away from Gojo.
Yuuji broke away from the fight, already spinning another palm full of his blood into Convergence. He shot it out at Toji as soon as it was formed, forcing him to dodge—forcing him farther away from Gojo. Yuuji ran at a full tilt towards Toji, trying to push him back further. Toji clearly knew what he was doing, judging by the way his grin sharpened. He retaliated, dodging the stream of pressurized blood and snapping Playful Cloud at Yuuji’s heels.
Yuuji jumped, dodging the hit. He rolled, closer to Toji—something Toji clearly wasn’t expecting to happen, considering he swore viciously. Yuuji threw one hand out, fingers just barely grazing his leg with his fingertips. The dashed lines of Cleave chopped across his pants a moment before the technique itself followed, slicing through both the fabric and the skin beneath. Like before, Toji was too naturally strong for any actual dismemberment to occur, but it sure did bleed. Besides, having the bottom half of his pants flopping around his shoe had to be inconvenient.
“Been a while since anyone landed a hit on me,” Toji said, looking largely unbothered if a little crazy.
“Maybe you’re just getting old,” Yuuji countered with a sharp grin.
The next second, one end of Playful Cloud clapped him across the cheek, snapping the sunglasses he had been wearing and sending the two different pieces skittering across the ground.
Well, that fucking hurt.
“Ooh,” Toji said, with a falsely sympathetic tone, when Yuuji looked back at him, his face fully exposed. “Now that’s a nasty scar. No eye, huh?”
“Nah,” Yuuji said. “Not for a while. Did you really have to hit me in the face, man? You trying to make me even dumber?”
“Heh,” Toji said, which might as well have been an agreement, and swung Playful Cloud again.
Yuuji dodged him this time, using his momentum to carry him to his feet. He kicked at Toji, cursed energy rippling, and Toji flipped another section of Playful Cloud up to block him. They collided, sending Yuuji backwards. He swung into a dodge immediately, going to the left in hopes of avoiding another hit.
It was unfortunate that this was happening on the cusp of another battle, that Yuuji had already expended so much of his energy before coming here. He could fight for a long time—stamina was one of his stronger points—but even he had limits to how much he could do.
He needed to decide—get out of range from Gojo, expend his remaining energy reserves on the domain, and hopefully save the day, or keep fighting this way, one hit after the other until Yuuji had nothing left to give. He didn’t know which was going to be better against an opponent like this guy.
Yuuji hadn’t had to fight someone that was tough in this specific way before.
And then the decision was made for him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gojo twitch, half sitting up. Maybe not fully healed yet, but healing. Moving. Hopefully able to finish this—but Yuuji needed to give him one last opening.
And Yuuji had gotten Toji plenty far enough away from the school and other casualties that Yuuji could finally risk it.
Toji moved to strike—Yuuji moved at the same time. He caught Playful Cloud with his hand, wincing as he felt one bone in his pointer finger snap from the force. He jerked—borrowing an old trick from Yuuta and reinforcing his body with cursed energy to give himself artificial strength. He was a little surprised it worked—he wasn’t used to having to compensate for his strength, but in a battle of physical prowess with Toji, Yuuji was confident he would lose. As it was, he only barely managed to tug Toji half a step forward.
But it was enough to unsettle him, throwing off his movements, keeping him from immediately launching his next attack.
Long enough for Yuuji to make the seal he needed.
“Domain Expansion,” he said, creating the shrine with his fingers. “Malevolent Shrine.”
Toji’s eyes widened.
In the fraction of a second it took Yuuji to open the domain, he struck—not with Playful Cloud, but with the Inverted Spear of Heaven, retrieved quicker than Yuuji’s brain could even really process it and now attached to a chain on one end, giving him a lot more reach than he had a second ago.
Malevolent Shrine slammed into existence, the guaranteed hit already taking effect.
Less than a second later, the Inverted Spear cut into Yuuji’s gut, slicing him open from naval to shoulder. He gasped, blood already collecting at an alarming rate, but it was done.
He had beaten Fushiguro Toji in a batlle of speed. The damage he could heal later—the most important thing was that he had put Toji on the defensive and that now, whatever else happened, he had bought someone else enough time to win.
Yuuji slumped to his knees, feeling bloodier and more bruised than he had after a fight in a long time. Despite that he grinned, looking up as he watched Toji parrying the strikes of a thousand cleaves.
He didn’t die—Yuuji suspected he was entirely too formidable for that—and Yuuji couldn’t hold up the domain for longer than a few seconds, but when it dropped…
When it dropped, they were both standing across from each other, eyes bright, smiles sharp, covered in their own blood.
Yuuji knew he had overdone it in the next moment, his energy drained and his body aching. He pitched forward, landing on his knees first and face down on his stomach second, feeling slightly delirious.
What the hell am I doing, anyway, he found himself wondering, as his eyes slipped softly closed. Who just time travels and starts fighting people? This is why Kugisaki used to call me a moron.
And then Yuuji lost his last battle with consciousness, slipping into a heavy, bloody sort of sleep.
It didn’t matter, anyway. Across the courtyard Gojo Satoru was rising to his feet, a god born again, to live again, to fight again.
After the fact, Satoru returned to look for the pink haired sorcerer.
He had thought at first that the sorcerer that saved him might have been an illusion. Something conjured up by his mind in his last moments, a handsome savior come to pull him out of the trenches and restore him to his glory. Except the boy was real, and he was lying right where Satoru had left him, looking only slightly better than he had when Satoru had started fighting Toji.
Which was to say he was lying there still, face pointed to the sky. His cursed energy was a mosaic, patently strange, exceedingly rare. For the first time in a long time, Satoru wasn’t able to read someone with the Six Eyes. Or at least, he was so confused about what he was reading that he might as well have not gotten the input at all. The only thing that was clear was that there was a reverse cursed technique at play here somewhere.
One thing he knew for sure—whatever hole this boy had crawled out of, it didn’t belong to this world.
Satoru crouched down beside the pink-haired sorcerer.
He didn’t look like much of a savior. He looked tired, worn down, like he had been fighting for years and years and he was still fighting. He wasn’t pretty—not like Suguru—but he had a rough handsomeness to him. Sharp cheek bones, a strong jaw, slightly shrunken cheeks like he didn’t eat enough. His hair was either dyed pink expertly and recently or naturally that color. Since he was a sorcerer, Satoru was inclined to believe the second. He was muscular and tall, though probably not quite as tall as Satoru.
He was covered in scars.
Satoru allowed himself to observe them last, because they were the most fascinating aspect of his appearance. There were thinner scars crisscrossing the sorcerer’s arms, visible with how his sleeves were rolled up. Neatly, expertly, like he had put this nondescript black hoodie on this morning with the intention of fighting in it. He was missing a finger on his left hand too, the left behind scar jagged and rough, like the finger had been torn off rather than cut cleanly.
The scars on his face were more noticeable. One at the corner of his mouth, pulling at his lips, like someone had decided to take a bite out of his face. Another over the bridge of his nose, another diagonal between his brows and over his forehead. There was a large, messy one over his cheekbone and the eye socket, right side, though still his eyelashes fluttered softly against his cheekbone on that eye. Long. Almost pretty.
For some reason that had nothing to do with the Six Eyes, Satoru felt like he knew this boy already.
He reached out—hesitantly, at first, before he remembered he was Gojo Satoru and he didn’t let societal norms hold him back. Infinity shimmered between them—Satoru must have left it on reflexively after the fight he just had—but Satoru dropped it quickly, resting the pad of his thumb against the scar at the corner of the sorcerer’s mouth. He traced it slowly, following the edge, noticing the difference between the soft skin and the harder, tighter skin of the old wound.
One eye shot open just as Satoru started to pull away, staring up at him. Satoru almost pulled away anyway, but something held him there—something in the way this boy looked at him, like maybe he knew Satoru too.
The sorcerer let out a rough, hitching breath that usually preceded tears, though no tears followed. Maybe he couldn’t even cry anymore through all the damage—Satoru didn’t really know how scars worked but that seemed like a logical assumption.
“Thank god,” was all the sorcerer said, and dropped his head back, eyes drifting off of Satoru’s face and up to the clear blue sky above them. Satoru felt the words moving against his thumb, where he was still holding it against the scar at the corner of his mouth.
Satoru finally withdrew his hand. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Probably not, no,” the boy responded, a little hollowly. “You’re…. what? Fifteen? Sixteen? You don’t know me. I don’t even really know me. I don’t even know where the fuck I am, man.”
“You’re delirious from blood loss,” Satoru said, which was a guess more than anything. It sounded right though, like something someone would say on a cop show. “You’ve gotta tell me your name and your birthday and stuff now, just to make sure you’re all square.”
The tiniest, most strangely captivating smile Satoru had ever seen turned the corners of his lips upwards. “If you wanted me to introduce myself, you could have just said.”
“Could I have?” Satoru asked lightly. “You still haven't introduced yourself, anyway, and I’m pretty sure I’ve asked.”
“Yuuji,” he said, flicking his honey brown eye back over to Satoru. Satoru found himself wondering if the other one worked at all, or if Yuuji was down to just the one. That scar certainly made it seem possible. “March 20th.”
“No last name? Birth year?” Satoru asked.
Yuuji huffed, like this was funny, and said, “You haven’t introduced yourself to me either, you know.”
The lightheartedness was ridiculous at a time like this.
There was a body lying in a puddle of his own blood not far from where Satoru and Yuuji were. There was a hole in him—a hole Satoru put there—something so dire that not even the best reverse cursed technique would be able to fix. And there was Satoru, Satoru who was now a murderer—which hadn’t seemed like a big hurdle to cross when it was happening, but now felt like a very big change—who now knew what it meant to be infinite. And there was this sorcerer—this boy who hardly looked older than Satoru himself—lying on the ground and healing himself slowly as cursed energy trickled back into him, mysterious and terrifying and otherworldly.
He had saved Satoru’s life—Satoru knew that for certain. Had Fushiguro Toji reemerged from the Tombs and saw that Satoru could still move and breathe and sit up, Satoru would not have survived a second time.
And Satoru could see him—he could see the swirl of his cursed energy, the maelstrom of other energies within him. He had dealt with the elders enough already to know what the outcome would be if they found Yuuji—execution.
If Satoru was anyone other than himself, the answer would be to let it happen—Yuuji was dangerous, that much was clear. He was possibly even dangerous to Satoru.
“Can you stand?” Satoru asked, surprised by the gentleness of his own voice. “Assistant managers and sorcerers are going to be crawling all over this place soon. If they find you, you’ll be executed.”
“Yeah, I imagine they would probably try that,” Yuuji said, like it didn’t really bother him one way or another. He brought one hand up—the one missing the finger—and rubbed absently at a spot under his left eye.
And then his lips curved.
“They’ve got to give me a trial though, right? Or at least put on a show of giving me a trial?”
“It wouldn’t be in any way fair,” Satoru warned. “You really should—”
“No, no, I’ll be fine,” Yuuji said. “You’ll have to trust me on this one. I learned how to beat the elders into submission from the best.”
He sat up then, a ghost of a smile on his lips and a gleam in his eye.
“Who’s the best?” Satoru asked, feeling out of his depth for the second time in one day.
“You, obviously,” Yuuji said, and glanced over at him.
Satoru stared, feeling like it must be impossible and knowing it wasn’t at the same time—in some deep, intuitive way he couldn’t have examined more thoroughly even if he wanted to.
It was rare that he felt so at a loss for words.
“Well?” Yuuji said, after Satoru stayed silent for too long. “Are you going to arrest me or not, Sensei?”
I wonder, Satoru thought, for the first time in his life, if this is how other people feel when they deal with me.
“You know what,” Satoru said, feeling lighter than he really should have. “Sure. I’ll arrest you. Since you asked so nicely and all.”
That small, mischievous smile grew just a little more.
And then—
“Wait. What the hell did you call me?”